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My friend S. Irene Virbila, restaurant critic at the Los Angeles Times, wrote an interesting post on that paper’s food blog over the weekend. Unusual lamb cuts, she writes, are trending in L.A.: “…not just lamb sirloin or scottadito (tiny chops to pick up by the bone and nibble) but lamb belly, lamb tongue, lamb brains and a cut I’m seeing more and more, lamb neck.”

Funny — lamb cuts are trending in Dallas, too! Maybe not the same cuts — lately I’ve come across lamb breast at both Central 214 and Campo Modern Country Bistro, and lamb sweetbreads at Campo, too.

S. Irene also mentions two other L.A. trends: pots de crème and Canadian poutine. Ha! — We’ve got L.A. beat on the first. A year and a half ago we were seeing sumptuous pots de crème everywhere — I wrote about it in a Table Talk column in November, 2010. As for Canadian poutine — french fries and cheese curds smothered in gravy — it’s not exactly all over Dallas menus. Yet, anyway. Next big food trend of 2012?

If you happen to be a restaurant criticism junkie, you may have been following what’s going on in Los Angeles — Pulitzer-prize winning restaurant critic Jonathan Gold has left the L.A. Weekly and joined the staff of the L.A. Times, where S. Irene Virbila is also still restaurant critic. The paper has eliminated its Wednesday food section and now readers get reviews from both critics in a Saturday features section. Also, the paper recently erected a paywall.

And I’m sorry to be a little late on this, but the paper announced on Thursday that it would no longer assign star ratings to its restaurant reviews. “There are a couple of reasons for this,” wrote Food Editor Russ Parsonson the paper’s food blog, the Daily Dish. “First, star ratings are increasingly difficult to align with the reality of dining in Southern California — where your dinner choices might include a food truck, a neighborhood ethnic restaurant, a one-time-only pop-up run by a famous chef, and a palace of fine dining. Clearly, you can’t fairly assess all these using the same rating system. Furthermore, the stars have never been popular with critics because they reduce a thoughtful and nuanced critique to a simple score. In its place, we’ll offer a short summary of the review.”

So, is it true that stars have never been popular with critics? I don’t know. Certainly having to assign a star rating makes my job more difficult. But it forces me to focus my critical thinking in a way that I think is very useful to readers — which to me is hugely important. Of course a star rating cannot replace a nuanced critique, but I feel it works well in tandem with the review — the critique along with the star rating. What do you think? Do you like the star system? Does the number of stars a restaurant receives help you decide whether to spend your money there? Or do you think that given the changing ways in which we dine that the star system has become anachronistic? We would really love to hear your thoughts.

Here is S. Irene Virbila’s just-published, sans stars review of the new Wolfgang Puck at Hotel Bel-Air. And Jonathan Gold writes an essay about the state of dining in L.A., which has the effect of bolstering the decision to drop the stars. I was not blocked by the paywall.

Over at the Atlantic’s food blog, Clay Risen is causing a stir today by asking “what is the role of the food and drink critic?” The question was prompted by his being invited to taste a 50-year old Glenfiddich valued at about $760 a glass. Since then, he’s been asking himself why they invited him. “If I talk about the experience, ” he writes, “all I’m doing is bragging. My thumbs up or down cannot possibly persuade anyone to try it, since almost no one can afford it, and those who can, and want to pay the price, will probably do so for reasons other than pure Dionysian delight. The easy answer is marketing, that letting me taste the best of their lot will endear me to Glenfiddich in the future, either because I love their whisky or feel indebted to their kindness.”Continue reading →